Going green: Follow the recycling process

Saturday

While it's taken years for recycling to become a household word, not everyone participates.

Government mandates and high landfill costs have been the needed push to get the recycling cycle rolling. And more people are learning how important it is to use and reuse, rather than using valuable land to pile up mountains of garbage that may take thousands of years to disintegrate while leaking toxic chemicals into the ground and aquifer.

But what happens to all that stuff people drop into the recycle containers?

The process begins in homes and businesses. The most common items households recycle are paper, plastic, aluminum and glass. Cardboard is recycled separately.

In communities such as Kinston, La Grange and Snow Hill, recyclables are placed in a small bin or larger roll-out cart and placed at the curb for pickup day. Cardboard must be dropped off separately at special container sites, even if there is curbside pickup.

County residents may pay for curbside pickup, but they generally carry their regular garbage to one of several nearby county-run convenience sites, which also have containers for the common recyclables, as well as for cardboard.

These items are then picked up by solid waste trucks and taken to a site that separates the various materials.

The paper, plastic, aluminum and glass are mixed together and called comingles. But they have to be separated so each type of material can be made into new products. The basic process involves at least three steps.

Step 1: The pickup

Snow Hill Town Administrator Dana Hill said the town contracts to have recyclables picked up on Mondays for no extra cost to residents. The town uses 18-gallon bins.

"You don't have to separate it," he said. "They do that at the transfer station."

In La Grange, pickup is on Wednesdays, Tyrone Morgan, public services director, said.

"We have our own sanitation department," he said. The town has been recycling for five years. Prior to that, it contracted the work.

"We were able to perform services with inmate labor," Morgan said. But that service is no longer available.

In July, La Grange began automated pickup to keep providing service, while maintaining costs, he said.

The city of Kinston also maintains its own automated trucks and picks up recyclables the first three Wednesdays of the month.

The city has been collecting them since the 1980s, Ruth Tanner, environmental superintendent, said. That's when federal laws started requiring recycling, she said. Kinston began picking up the small bins.

"Recycling at that time was very new to everyone," Tanner wrote in an email. "It wasn't known at that time how big recycling would become. Over the years, as more and more customers started to understand the importance of recycling, we moved to larger containers for the customers."

In November 2006, the city began using 95-gallon carts.

Cardboard should be flattened and taken to a designated container where Waste Industries picks it up.

Step 2: Sorting

The comingles are trucked to a materials recovery facility, or MRF (pronounced merf), to be separated. Paper, plastic, aluminum and steel cans and glass, as well as cardboard, are brought to the MRF, said Patrick McDonald, plant manager at Sonoco Recycling in Raleigh.

"And then our equipment basically breaks that stream down into it's individual components," he said, "so our finished products will be things like a bale of cardboard, a bale of newspaper, aluminum, steel cans and various types of plastics."

Like a river of water, the one stream of comingles branches into various tributaries of individual materials.

"It's a fairly advanced processing facility with a number of mechanical separating components, as well as manual labor," McDonald said, "to separate all the components, or all the single stream into the individual components."

About 10 percent of the material trucked into the plant is considered residue, or not recyclable, he said.

"Unfortunately, we are seeing that (percent) grow as municipalities and counties expand the roll-out carts for homes," McDonald said.

He called it a "double-edged sword" because the bigger carts encourage more recycling — which is a good thing — but there is less visibility by workers at the curb to ensure non-recyclables are not dropped into the cart.

Placing only allowable recyclables in the cart or bin benefits everyone. MRFs have to haul non-recyclables to the landfill at a cost that is ultimately passed down to the consumer.

Residents should rinse containers before putting them into a bin or cart, but they don't need to wash them spotless. However, less food, grease or other residue makes less work and cost at the plant.

Waste Industries picks up subscription curbside recyclables in Lenoir and Greene counties, Mark Myers, director of sales and marketing, wrote in an email.

“The commingle,” he wrote, “after being collected, is dumped at our Transfer Station in Wilson and then loaded into a 53-foot trailer and transferred to Sonoco in Raleigh. The cardboard is taken to our Wilson Branch, baled and then sold to a buyer.”

Step 3: New products

"In Sonoco's case, we're a little bit unique," McDonald said, "because we are our own customer for a lot of our fiber products."

Sonoco Recycling is a subsidiary of Sonoco Products, which operates paper mills and other production plants. So the Raleigh MFR sells bales of newspaper and cardboard to its parent company for paper manufacturing.

"In addition," McDonald said, "we also do sell some of that material to the open market." One of those companies is Unifi in Yadkinville.

“The chopped plastic bottle flake is melted down and run through a series of filtration processes," she said, "and the resulting REPREVE recycled polymer is in chip form."

REPREVE, a sustainable product, is spun into polymer yarn to sell to various manufacturers for products made by such companies as Ford, The North Face, Patagonia and Haggar. It's what you might find in clothing made of polyester and polyester blends.

"REPREVE can be found in multiple consumer products," Anderson said, "from automobile interiors to home furnishings and apparel.”

Another Sonoco market is Reflective Recycling in Wilson. The company recycles glass, which comes in as broken bottle pieces or whole bottles, Supply Manager Carl Massey said. But it's not ready to use.

"The first thing we try to do is separate it from the other materials," he said.

Reflective uses the amber, clear and green glass, which has to be separated, cleaned and broken into .5-inch to 2-inch pieces.

All of this is done on $8.5 million machinery, Massey said.

"We turn it around and market that to make new bottles," he said.

Reflective serves a niche market in Wilson mainly because its primary market is located there — Verallia, which makes bottles and jars, Massey said. Other uses include counter tops, concrete additives and abrasives for sandblasting.

Massey said people often throw away bottles, but the company could take in more.

"The good thing about glass is," he said, "it's infinitely recyclable."

Benefits of recycling

In the past year, Kinston picked up nearly 628.5 tons of recyclables.

Tanner said recycling is convenient and economical if people recycle the correct items.

"Recycling is one of the best ways you can protect the environment," she wrote. "Recycling saves our natural resources, keeps reusable items out of our landfills and provides the materials needed to make recycled products."

Morgan said he estimates about 65 percent of La Grange customers recycle.

"They get more bang for their buck, for sure," he said. "Recycling, of course, it helps the environment. The more you recycle, it helps on the tipping fees and what you dump on the environment. It helps everyone."

Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.

State regulations for recycling

Source: City of Kinston

How to prepare your recyclables

Source: City of Kinston

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